In his
recent debate with
Richard Carrier, David Marshall made the following claims (Debate video):

“Not only is Christianity reasonable in that it
makes practical sense to believe it, and that Christians have always reasoned
to and for their faith. There are also good reasons to believe -- good
evidences -- that Christianity is true. Let me give three, briefly. (1)
Miracles. (2) Anthropology, a God that transcends particular cultures. (3) New
Testament criticism -- the person of Jesus” (apx. 10:18-10:32 on
YouTube video).

For
his anthropological evidence, Marshall principally cites the claims of Émile
Durkheim (1858-1917), the putative father of modern sociology, on the religion
of Australian aborigines.

Having
received my undergraduate degree in anthropology, and having undertaken a year
of graduate work in anthropology, at the University of Arizona, I was curious
to see what Marshall’s powerful “anthropological” argument would be.

Not
surprisingly, I found that Marshall blatantly misrepresented Durkheim.In addition, his discussion of Durkheim
shows that he is poorly read in the anthropological debates surrounding the
nature of the religion of Australian aborigines.

In
particular, I will show that:

A.
Durkheim did not claim that all cultures believe in a Supreme being.

B.
Durkheim did not even claim that all Australian cultures believed in a
Supreme Being.

C.
Durkheim’s interpretations were challenged from the beginning, and are now
widely rejected.

D.
Christianization or misinterpretation of native terminology remains a viable
explanation for the reports quoted by Durkheim that show any belief in a
“Supreme God.”

E.
Multiple cultures, or even all cultures, having similar concepts of God does
not demonstrate the perception of some transcendent reality.

MARSHALL’S BASIC APOLOGETIC STRATEGY

Marshall’s
general apologetic strategy is to prove that all cultures have a concept of a
Supreme Being. Presumably, this would demonstrate that there must be some
transcendent reality that all cultures are authentically perceiving.

So,
Marshall enlists the aid of Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist who is also
towering figure in the anthropology of religion. In 1912, Durkheim published The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (originally
in Frenchas Les Formes elémentaires de la vie religieuse), which is now
regarded as a classic in the anthropology of religion.

“And Richard Carrier also say [sic], ‘Were the Christian
God genuinely communicating with us, his communications would be consistent
across all times and regions." (43) (Carrier, Why I am not a Christian,
43)

So here's the argument: If God existed, he would
transcend the creation of any given culture. But God does NOT transcend the
creation of any given culture: he arose maybe during the reign of King Josiah
in the Old Testament, and then radiated out to form Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam.

BUT:

But, as Durkheim also noted, the Australian God
was ‘fundamentally the same everywhere.’ ‘Eternal,’ ‘a sort of creator,’
‘father of men,’ ‘made animals and trees,’ ‘benefactor,’ ‘communicates,’
‘punishes,’ ‘judge after death,’ and they ‘feel his presence everywhere’” [See also 17:53-18:53 on YouTube video].

MARSHALL’S
PREVIOUS USE OF DURKHEIM

Marshall’s
reference to Durkheim in the debate with Carrier was actually a summary of a
longer extract that he previously quoted in his book, Jesus and The Religions of Man (p. 185).

To
understand how thoroughly Marshall misrepresents Durkheim, and how poorly informed
Marshall is in this area, it will be useful to quote more extensively what he
said in that book:

“Anthropologists reasoned that if one
wanted to study the origins of religion, one had better go to the most
primitive tribes, assumed to be the aborigines of Australia. So a great deal of
the debate swirled around the Outback. The first reports claimed aborigines had hardly any religion, certainly no concept as advanced as a
Supreme God. Then reports came in from many directions of an omniscient being
known as Bunjil, Daramulun, Baiame, or Nuralie. Tylor blamed missionaries for
planting this concept among the aborigines.

When that was no longer feasible, Emile
Durkheim tried to tie the Aussie God to his theory of totemism, and to
marginalize him by calling him a ‘high god,’ as [Karen] Armstrong marginalized
him by using the term ‘Yahwism.’ But the fact remains, when they looked for the
most primitive religion, this is what they found:

‘The characteristics of this personage
are fundamentally the same everywhere. It is [an] immortal and indeed an
eternal being, since it is derived from no other...He is spoken of as a sort of
creator. He is called the father of men and is said to have made them...At the
same time as he made man [sic] this divine personage made the animals and the
trees...He is the benefactor of humanity...He communicates...the guardian of
tribal morality, he punishes...he performs the function of judge after death
distinguishing between the good and the bad...they feel his presence everywhere’” [my underlined emphasis].

Marshall
is quoting pages 288-292 of the English edition of The Elementary Forms by Karen Fields published in 1995. One need
only check Fields’ translation to see that Marshall’s ellipses hide a lot of
pertinent information.

I have
no problem with using ellipses per se, but I do have a problem when the
information left out can undermine the very thesis that Marshall dismisses—namely,
that Christianization was responsible for the reports of a Supreme Being among
these aborigines.

Items left
out, seemingly systematically so, were those that would show how much Jesus
parallels other gods or those that show biblical parallels indicative of
Christianization. Otherwise, parallels between Jesus and other gods is
something that Marshall spends much of his time trying to deny or minimize.

For
example, here are some other “characteristics of this personage” omitted by
Marshall in his extract from Fields’ edition:

-

“After having lived on earth for a time, he
lifted himself or was carried into the sky.” Compare the story of Jesus’
ascension in Luke 24 and Acts 1.

-“He made a statuette out of clay; then he
danced around it several times, breathed into his nostrils, and the statuette
came alive and began to walk.”Compare how the male is created in Genesis 2:7 (RSV): “then the LORD God
formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath
of life; and man became a living being.”

WHAT DURKHEIM ACTUALLY BELIEVED

Durkheim
definitely DID NOT believe that all cultures had a notion of a Supreme God. In
the very first chapter of The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim emphatically declared:

“In the first place, there are great
religions from which the idea of gods and spirits is absent or plays only a
secondary and inconspicuous role. This is the case in Buddhism” (The
Elementary Forms, p. 28).

So,
apparently Marshall did not read Durkheim’s book at all. It looks as if he
followed his old custom of cherry-picking some quote he found to support his
position, and then did not bother to read any further.

And if
he did read Durkheim’s book, then he very clearly is unscrupulous in his
representation of that thinker.

If this
misrepresentation is not alarming enough, it is also clear that Durkheim did
not even believe that “the Australian God was ‘fundamentally the same
everywhere.’ ‘Eternal,’ ‘a sort of creator,’ ‘father of men,’ ‘made animals and
trees,’ ‘benefactor,’ ‘communicates,’ ‘punishes,’ ‘judge after death,’ and they
‘feel his presence everywhere.’”

Durkheim, in
fact, made it very clear that he was speaking of a subset of Australian tribes,
and not anything that can be generalized as “the Australian God.”

In the pages
just prior to the one quoted by Marshall, Durkheim had discussed other tribes
that did not have a concept of any Supreme God, but rather a mythology that
involved many gods whose relative rank to each other was not clear.

In the very
first page of the section of The
Elementary Forms cited by Marshall himself (Jesus and the Religions of Man, p. 207, n.4), Durkheim marks his
transition to tribes that do believe in a Supreme Being as follows:

“Yet even this mythological formation is not the most
advanced that is to be found among the Australians. Several tribes have
achieved a conception of a god who, if not the only one, is at least the
supreme one, and one to whom a preeminent position among other religious
entities is ascribed” (The Elementary
Forms, p. 288, my underlined emphasis).

So, how did
Marshall miss the fact that Durkheim is only talking about some tribes when
Marshall himself is citing the very page from Durkheim that undermines his
claim? And if he did read what Durkheim said on that page, why did he not tell
us the truth? Why generate such a canard?

A. W. Howitt, one of Durkheim's sources

As Durkheim
himself acknowledges, much of his information came from the British-Australian
anthropologist, Alfred W. Howitt (1830-1908). But Howitt himself says that such
a belief in any Supreme Being is not generalized, but regional: “If the Queensland coast tribes are included, then the western bounds might be indicated by a line drawn from the mouth of the Murray River to Cardwell,
including the Great Dividing Range, with some of the fall inland in New South Wales. This would define the part of
Australia in which a belief exists in an anthropomorphic supernatural being, who lives in the sky, and who is supposed to have some kind of influence on the morals of the natives. No
such belief seems to obtain
in the remainder
of Australia, although there are indications of a belief in anthropomorphic beings inhabiting the sky-land” (A.W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia [London: Macmillan, 1904]
p. 500; my underlined emphasis).

In sum, Marshall
has taken Durkheim’s description of the beliefs of “several tribes” and
transformed it into a description of some generalized “Australian God,” who was
“fundamentally the same everywhere.”

DURKHEIM: BACKGROUND DEBATES

Understanding
Durkheim’s claims involves understanding that he was part of a larger debate
about the origin and nature of religion. For our purposes, two positions, here
greatly simplified, were at issue:

A. Scholars who thought that the most
primitive cultures did not have “religion” or a concept of a Supreme Being. Representatives included Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), who believed that religion had
progressed through the following stages: Animism > Polytheism > Monotheism,
and James George Frazer
(1854–1941), who thought
that he could identify an evolutionary path as follows: Magic > Religion
> Science. Baldwin Spencer
(1860-1929) and Francis J. Gillen (1855-1912), two of the authors on which
Durkheim depends for his information about Australian aborigines, belonged to
this camp.

B. Scholars who thought that notions of
a Supreme Being were found in every culture, regardless of how “primitive” it
was.
Representatives included Carl Strehlow (1871–1922), a Lutheran missionary who also was one
of the sources quoted by Durkheim, and Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954), a Roman
Catholic priest who wrote a monumental work, The Origin of the Idea of God (1912-1955), which sought to prove
that monotheism was present in the most primitive religions.

As
already mentioned, Durkheim did not believe that every religion had a god, let
alone a Supreme Being.

However,
Durkheim did claim that a belief in a Supreme Being could be found in a
group of Australian aborigines called the Arunta, and also known as the Aranda
or the Arrernte.

The Arunta Aborigines

This
group of people, which bears many subgroups, centered around the town of Alice
Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Insofar
as the Arunta were concerned, Durkheim sided with Strehlow, and not with Specer
and Gillen. In fact, in the passage just prior to the extract quoted by
Marshall, Durkheim says (Elementary Forms,
p. 289):

“Finally, in contrast to Spencer and
Gillen, who claim not to have observed a belief in a god proper among the Arunta,
Strehlow assures us that this people, as well as the Loritja, recognize a true
‘good god’ with the name Altjira.”

So,
Marshall’s extract actually describes the beliefs of the Arunta (and Loritja),
and not those of every group in Australia.

Carl Strehlow, another of Durkheim's sources

WHO WAS CARL STREHLOW?

Carl Strehlow
was a German Lutheran missionary, who was one of Durkheim’s sources for
information about the Arunta.

Strehlow’s
main ethnography was Die
Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (The Aranda- and Loritja Tribes of Central Australia) published
in 1899. You can find a digitized version on-line here:Strehlow's Ethnography.

It was
Strehlow who helped to popularize the belief that the Arunta had a concept of a
Supreme Being.

In
1894, Strehlow started his work at Hermannsburg, a mission established by the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1875 to the west of Alice Springs in Australia’s
Northern Territory, and named after the Hermannsburg Mission Institute in
Germany. Thus, Strehlow arrived after an entire generation of natives had had
contact with Christian missionaries in that area.

Yet,
note Marshall’s facile dismissal of Christian influences on the aborigines: “Tylor blamed missionaries for planting this
concept among the aborigines. When that was no longer feasible...”

Actually,
Marshall provides no evidence for why that charge of Christianization “was no
longer feasible,” and he is completely unfamiliar with the fact that
Christianization is still a widely held conclusion for Strehlow’s reports of a
Supreme Being among the aborigines.

Northern Territory where Strehlow worked

For example,
consider this very detailed study of the issue by Angus Nicholls, “Anglo-German Mythologics: the Australian Aborigines and
Modern Theoriesof Myth in the Work of Baldwin Spencer and Carl Strehlow,”
History of the Human
Sciences 20, no. 1 (2007):
83-114.Nicholls
concludes:

“There is no doubt that Carl Strehlow could not have been
highly self-reflexive in relation to the fundamental presupposition that lay
behind all of his research: namely, his conviction that all human beings on the
earth are the children of a monotheistic God and his consequent desire to convert
the Arrernte to the Christian faith. It was this presupposition, perhaps
combined with the suggestive questions of Leonhardi, that arguably led him to
interpret the concept of Altjira as referring to something resembling
the High God of Christian monotheism”(“Anglo-German Mythologics,” p. 107).

ONE WORD: ALTJIRA

At the
very center of the debates is the meaning of one Arunta word: Altjira. This is the word that Carl Strehlow
had interpreted as the Supreme Being. However, Spencer and Gillen disagreed,
and thought it referred to some mythical past or “Dreamtime” epoch.

An
enormous amount of work has been expended to decide the issue, but to this day
it is difficult to know what that word meant in pre-colonial times. The main
difficulty comes because Carl Strehlow was interacting with aborigines who had
already been influenced by Christian missionaries.

The
first piece of evidence for this Christianization is the aformentioned work by
Strehlow on these Aborigines: The Aranda- and Loritja Tribes of Central
Australia.

On the very first page of this work, Strehlow begins
by identifying his informants. There is a photograph with the caption: “Die vier Schwarzen, die die meisten sagen
erzählt haben.” (= “The four black [men], who related most of the
legends”). They are dressed in western clothes, and they don’t seem to be fully
following their aboriginal culture any longer.

In addition, Strehlow did not like to
do all the fieldwork necessary to understand native religious practices. For
example, Nicholls
makes the following observation:

“Although he lived and worked with
the Australian Aborigines for over 30 years, he nevertheless continued to regard
them as being heathens who were ultimately alien to his own Christian cultural
orientation, and for this reason he refused to attend corroborees or to
investigate sacred aboriginal sites and objects. Moreover, he also punished
baptized Aborigines for attending corroborees, presumably on the basis that
Christian and aboriginal religious ceremonies were fundamentally incompatible,
and that the former belief system represented the only true path to salvation” (“Anglo-German Mythologics,”p.
97).

Given
those oppressive circumstances, which forced many natives to depend on the
missionaries for their food and sustenance, it would not be surprising that
they would say whatever the missionaries needed to hear to obtain food or avoid
punishment.

Baldwin Spencer was Strehlow's opponent

Spencer
and Gillen seized on this reluctance by Strehlow to do actual fieldwork in
order to show that the latter was not really interested in gathering authentic
information, but rather in Christianizing aborigines.

When a
Scottish historian named Andrew Lang (1844-1912) sent an inquiry to Spencer about
Strehlow’s reports of a Supreme Being among the Arunta, Spencer explained why
he disagreed.

Spencer’s
disagreement is detailed in a letter (dated December 9, 1903) that he wrote to
Frazer, and part of which reads as follows:

“Twenty years ago a
man named Kempe, one of the first missioners, seized upon the word Altjira (= our Alcheri) and adopted it as the word for ‘God’. He knew nothing of
its significance to the natives, or of its association with the word ‘Alcheringa’ (Acheri = dream; ringa
= of, belonging to), but he saw that it had some special or sacred
significance. Now after these twenty years (when the station has not been
closed or the missioners away) of endeavouring to teach the poor natives that
Altjira means ‘God’, Strehlow comes forward with the momentous discovery that
in the Arunta ‘there is a Being of the highest order called Altjira or
Altjiramara’ (mara = good) [and] that ‘Altjira is the
highest divinity; he is the creator of the world and the maker of men’
(sounds rather Scriptural). The paper only occupies 1 1⁄2 pp.
foolscap, but has more utter misleading nonsense packed into a small space than
I recollect coming across before”
(Marett and Penniman, Spencer’s
Scientific Correspondence, pp. 95–96; my underlined emphasis).

As
mentioned, by the time Strehlow arrived in the Australian mission in 1894, the
Lutherans had been teaching aborigines about Christianity for about 20 years.

Another problem is that some of the earliest published descriptions of altjira did not refer to a Supreme
being.

By
most accounts, the earliest published reference to the word altjira is by Louis Gustav Schulze
(1851-1924), another missionary who worked among the Arunta.

Schulze’s
relevant report was published in “The Aborigines of the Upper and Middle Finke
River: Their Habits and Customs, with Introductory Notes on the Physical and
Natural-History Features of the Country,” Transactions
of the Royal Society of South Australia 14 (1891):210-246. On p.
242 of that article, Schulze remarks:

“It must be mentioned here that the
natives possess small disks of slate and wood, about as large as the hand called
tjurunga arknanoa (festival plates),
which are secreted in caves, and which neither woman nor child must see. Upon
these various markings are engraved, which the respective old man to whom they
belong alone understands, describing the whole meaning of this tjurunga, as to its origin and purport.
They pretend that these tjurunga arknanoa
were altjira—that is, were not
made—but I suspect, as they occasionally give some to white people, that the
old men and sorcerers make them themselves.”

So,
from Schulze’s report, we understand that altjira:

A.
Could refer to plural objects or entities;

B. Means “were not made.”

Furthermore,
“altjira” seems adjectival (“not
made”) rather than the name for one God.If altjira = “Supreme Being,”
then it would make little sense in a sentence such as: “They pretend that these
tjurunga arknanoa were the Supreme
Being.”

On p.
220 of that same article, Schulze also remarks: “To explain spiritual matters to them is not easy, especially as there
are not words to express the ideas, and will have to be coined for that
purpose.”

Thus,
we do have evidence that words were coined and constructed for concepts and
beliefs that really had no Christian counterparts.

Further
confusion was caused by the publication, in the same periodical, of a grammar
and lexicon of the Arunta language by the aforementioned Rev. Hermann Kempe
(1844-1928), another Lutheran missionary.

Kempe’s
relevant publication is “A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language Spoken by
the Aborigines of the MacDonnell Ranges, South Australia,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal
Society of South Australia” 14 (1891):1-54.

Kempe
did translate altjira as “God” when
he used a form of altjira in a
sentence: “altjirala jingana etata ntema
[=] “God to melife gives”(“A
Grammar and Vocabulary,” p. 9).

However,
Spencer reports that, in a later communication, Kempe clarified his position:

“Many years ago we discussed the
question with Mr. Kempe who agreed with us that the word Altjira did not connote “God,” as understood by the white man, but
said that it was regarded by the missionaries as the word in the Arunta
language that seemed to approach most nearly in meaning and significance to
‘God,’ and therefore, in the absence of a definite term for the latter, they
had adopted the word Altjira.

In 1910, after the publication of the
first part of Mr. Strehlow’s work, we again communicated with the Rev. H.
Kempe, and received the following reply: ‘As regard to the word ‘Altjira’ in
the language of Central Australia, I beg to tell you that, so far as I know
the language, it is not ‘God’ in the sense in which we use the word—namely
a personal being—but it has a meaning of old, very old, something that has no
origin, mysterious, something that has always been so, also, always. Were Altjira an active being they would have
answered Altjirala; the syllable la is always added when a person
exercises will (force) which influences another being or thing. We have adopted
the word ‘God’ because we could find no better and because it comes nearest to
the idea of ‘eternal.’ The people through the usage of a word often use it as a
name for a person. This, according to my conviction, is the true meaning of the
word Altjira” (Spencer, The Arunta, p. 596; my underlined emphasis).

At the
same time, Spencer’s theory that the word Altjira
pertained to some “Dreamtime” has come under severe criticism. So has the
nature of his fieldwork, which did not always meet the best standards.

According
to Spencer’s biographers, Spencer’s partner, F. J. Gillen, sometimes staged
ceremonies for the benefit of photographs and bribed natives to give the
answers they wanted to hear (Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That is New, pp. 169, 173).

Indeed,
Marshall does not seem to appreciate how we must be critical of all
ethnographies, especially at a time when standards of ethics were not what they
are today.And even today, there
are still questions about how much we should trust ethnographies.We often cannot verify the reports of
these ethnographers ourselves.

In general,
anthropologists today are much more critical of ethnographies, especially after
the well-known controversies involving Margaret Mead (See Freeman) and Napoleon
Chagnon (See Chagnon controversy).

However,
the conclusion that Altjira does not
mean Supreme Being or High God remains convincing. Nicholls assesses the
situation this way:

“Later scholarship– which includes
but is not confined to work done by Carl Strehlow’s son T. G. H. Strehlow, a
native speaker of Arrernte as well as a trained linguist – has found in Carl Strehlow’s
favour concerning the definition of Altjira, while at the same time not
confirming his grander High-God hypothesis” (“Anglo-German Mythologics,” p. 105).

Similarly,
Erich Kolig (“Religious
Power and the All-Father in the Sky: Monotheism in Australian Aboriginal Culture
Reconsidered,”Anthropos 87 [1992]:9) concluded: “the All-Father concept is not an indigenous belief form, but is essentially of Christian provenance skillfully adapted to an Aboriginal cognitive background.”

To
be fair, Strehlow sometimes seems to have been ambivalent himself, as is
suggested by his note (“Anmerkung”) on p. 2 of his Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme, where he admits that he cannot find
a linguistic derivation for the word Altjira
(“Eine sprachliche Ableitung des Wortes Altjira konnte noch nicht gefunden
werden...”).

Given
my own independent readings of the relevant primary sources and ethnographies
in the original languages, I do concur with Nicholls (“Anglo-German Mythologics,”
p. 105), who says: “In short: both Spencer the
Darwinian biologist and Strehlow the missionarymisunderstood the Arrernte
culture by viewing it in terms of the presuppositions and prejudices that were
peculiar to their respective cultural backgrounds and professions –
presuppositions that were in turn reinforced and encouraged by the Europe-based
‘armchair anthropologists’ (Frazer and Leonhardi) who oversaw their research.”

In
addition to a lack of sophistication in how he reads ethnographies, Marshall simply
followed this long ethnocentric tradition.

CONCLUSIONS

David
Marshall claimed in his debate with Richard Carrier that “There are also
good reasons to believe -- good evidences -- that Christianity is true. Let me
give three, briefly. (1) Miracles. (2) Anthropology, a God that transcends
particular cultures. (3) New Testament criticism -- the person of Jesus.”

Given
the examination of the primary sources on this issue, we can conclude that his
second reason should now be banished forever from that list, and the other ones
should have been banished long ago.

Indeed,
we have demonstrated that:

A.
Durkheim did not think that all cultures believe in a Supreme Being.
Marshall shows again why he is regarded as a lackadaisical researcher who
simply cherry-picks quotes without bothering to read thoroughly the authors he
is quoting. He stops when he thinks he found something that supports his views.

B.
Durkheim did not even claim that all Australian cultures believed in a
Supreme being.This was a
particularly egregious misrepresentation by Marshall because the evidence was
there in the very pages he cited. Either Marshall
knowingly misrepresented what Durkheim said, or he just copied quotes from
other sources without bothering to actually read Durkheim.

C.
Durkheim’s interpretations were challenged from the beginning, and are now
widely rejected.Marshall shows
that he is poorly educated in almost any subject outside of the fields in which
he received training. Marshall’s claim that the idea of Christian contamination
was no longer feasible shows that he is not reading the relevant
anthropological literature of the time nor the modern scholarship that examins those first ethnographies.

D.
Christianization or misinterpretation of native terminology remains a viable
explanation for the reports quoted by Durkheim that show any belief in a
“Supreme God.” This is a conclusion supported by the earliest sources on the
meaning of Altjira, as well as by
knowledge of the history of the missionaries among the aborigines.

E.
Multiple cultures, or even all cultures, having similar concepts of God does
not demonstrate the perception of some transcendent reality.Even if all cultures in the world had a
concept of a Supreme Being, that would not constitute proof of the existence of
God or the reasonableness of Christianity.

Cultures
are human products, and so all it would show is that human beings generate
similar responses to the needs that they share. A Supreme Being, for example, could be expected in almost any
culture that has a hierarchical or patriarchal organization where rank is
recognized. Ranking is a human activity and proves nothing about a supernatural
origin.

In
addition, Stephen T. Asma argues that polytheism and animism have the
longest and most widespread presence in human cultures. So, perhaps Marshall
may need to admit that polytheists and animists are perceiving some
transcendental reality the best.

Hermannsburg today

We
must also not forget that there is a real cultural tragedy behind this
entire debate about aboriginal religion.For it was Christian missionaries who not only tried to impose their
religious concepts upon these native peoples, but it was also they who helped
to destroy their culture.

Indeed,
the general history of Christianity is one of destruction of native peoples and
their religion. Wherever Christianity spread, indigenous cultural destruction
followed, whether it be in the Americas, in Africa, or in Australia.

Of
course, these missionaries thought they were substituting something “better”
and more precious, which simply reflects the racism and ethnocentricity
associated with these missionaries.

Strehlow,
for one, had a racist disdain for native religions, and he used coercive
measure to ensure the destruction of native culture with the excuse that he was
“civilizing” them.

It is
no wonder that the Hermannsburg mission, to which Strehlow belonged, later had
a very ambivalent relationship to the Nazi regime, as has been discussed in Georg
Gremels, ed., Die Hermanssburg Mission und
das “Dritte Reich”: Zwischen faschistischer Verführung und lutherische
Beharrlichkeit (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005) = The Hermannsburg Mission and the Third Reich: Between Fascist Seduction
and Lutheran Perseverance.

For
years now, I have been saying that Marshall lacks the necessary languages,
reading, and scholarly equipment to comment on issues outside of his field.

I
don’t make this charge lightly. I make it on the basis of having examined his
work quite thoroughly.

In the
end, of course, such lack of diligence will only hurt Marshall’s cause,
especially if there are enough scholars willing to unravel the superficial
nonsense that passes for serious scholarship.

QUESTIONS
FOR MARSHALL

1. Why
did you not tellyour readers that
Durkheim did not believe that all religions have a notion of God?

2. Why
did you not tell your readers that Durkheim was speaking of only some
aboriginal tribes, and did not generalize about some “Australian God”?

3. Did
you read the works quoted by Durkheim, including those by Spencer and Gillen, Strehlow,
and Howitt?

4. Did
you read the works of Schulze and Kempe?

5.
What specific evidence can you provide about the meaning of the word altjira from aboriginal sources that have
had no contact with Christian missionaries?

6. If altjira means “Supreme Being,” how would
you translate yinga Alchera Nukula
found as sentence #15 in Spencer, The Arunta,
p. 306? Alchera is a variant of altjira for Spencer and other linguists.

H.
Kempe, “A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language Spoken by
the Aborigines of the MacDonnell Ranges, South Australia,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal
Society of South Australia” 14 (1891):1-54.

David Marshall, Jesus and the Religions of Man (Seattle:
Kuai Mui Press, 2000).

Hans Mol, “The Origin and Function of
Religion: A Critique of, and Alternative to, Durkheim's Interpretation of the
Religion of Australian Aborigines,” Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion, 18, no. 4 (1979):379-389.

D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, So Much that is New: Baldwin Spencer,
1860-1929: A Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985).

Angus
Nicholls, “Anglo-German Mythologics:
the Australian Aborigines and Modern Theories of Myth in the Work
of Baldwin Spencer and Carl Strehlow,” History
of the Human Sciences 20, no. 1 (2007):
83-114

Louis
Schulze, “The Aborigines of the Upper and Middle Finke River: Their Habits and
Customs, with Introductory Notes on the Physical and Natural-History Features
of the Country,” Transactions of the
Royal Society of South Australia 14 (1891):210-246.